Agenda & Tips

Operation Bypass

A fictional research on the opportunities to prepare Amsterdam for the doubling of the amount of visitors in the future. This projects takes part in the “Volksvlijt 2056″ exhibition in the Public Library of Amsterdam. Open from april till august 2016.

Long queues at museum entrances, overflowing shopping streets, and traffic congestion caused by tourist coaches and multi-passenger bike pubs. Amsterdam, a city with fewer than 900,000 inhabitants, attracts over 17 million tourists every year. And owing to rising economic prosperity, that number is set to double over the next decade.
The city is too crowded, and the balance between inhabitants and tourists has been upset. Emotions run high. Urban life is slowly being driven out of the city, to be replaced by a tourist monoculture. Local traders are making way for chains of ice cream parlors and Tours & Tickets shops. Pressure groups are already talking about the dangers of what’s called the Venice effect and warn against the Disneyfication of the city center. They want to call a halt to this development. A ban on more hotels in the center has already come into effect. The government is trying to spread tourism more widely by marketing the coastal resort of Zandvoort as Amsterdam Beach and promoting Muiderslot as Amsterdam Castle. But that’s just a drop in the ocean. Visitors come for a maximum of three days and, in that short space of time, they all race through the same bucket list: Anne Frank House, the I Amsterdam sign, the Dam, the Van Gogh Museum, the Red Light District. All this is located in the historical city center within a radius of five kilometres.